At face value, The Stendhal Sydrome could be just another Argento giallo
with a woman as the central character. However, close examination reveals
the film to be far more complex than this. In the film the central female
character alternates between feminine and masculine identities. The idea of
transsexuality instigated by Tenebrae is continued, but in a very different
way. However, before looking at The Stendhal Syndrome, it is worth considering
Freud's theories about Medusa and how closely they relate to Argento's narrative.
On two occasions during the Stendhal Syndrome, we encounter representations
of Medusa: first at the start of the film in the Ufizzi Gallery, and once
again at the Etruscan gallery in a flashback to Anna Manni's (Asia Argento)
childhood. These sightings of Medusa provide a link between the film and Freud's
essay, 'Medusa's Head'. In the essay, Freud identifies conflicting ideas that
arise from the sight of Medusa's severed head. Freud states that decapitation
symbolises castration. The terror of Medusa is thus a terror of castration
linked to the sight of something. The hair upon Medusa's head is frequently
represented in works of art in the form of snakes, also derived from the castration
complex. However they serve as a mitigation of the horror as they replace
the penis, the absence of which causes the horror. The sight of Medusa turns
the viewer to stone, makes him stiff with terror, or gives him an erection
that reassures him of the fact that he still possesses a penis. The virgin
goddess Athene wears the image of Medusa on her dress and becomes a woman
who is unapproachable and repels all sexual desires - since she displays the
terrifying genitals of the mother. (1).
These conflicting ideas are useful in assessing the gender crisis suffered
by Anna during the film, and the bizarre, sadistic behaviour of Alfredo Grossi
(Thomas Kretschmann), the serial rapist/murderer. It is Alfredo who initiates
the gender confusions within the film when he makes the first telephone call
to Anna, in order to lure her to the Ufizzi Gallery. Anna believes that the
call is from an anonymous woman who wants to help catch the rapist, but Alfredo
is using an electronic gadget to make him sound like a woman. During the course
of the film Anna goes through three phases of identity/gender changes as discussed
below.
a) Anna as a woman.
Anna is a police detective, traditionally a male role, tracking down a serial
rapist/killer, she also boxes with male sparring partners. Her name, Manni
carries male signifiers, whilst her boss's name Manetti similarly suggests
'man', but in a diminutive form. She suffers from the Stendhal Syndrome, a
condition that causes her to hallucinate and faint when confronted by great
works of art. The condition also brings about depression and personality changes.
It was first written about by the French novelist Stendhal, whose diary contained
an account of his visit to the Church at Santa Croce, where he fainted in
sympathetic response to a painting. (2). An anonymous telephone call from
a 'woman' leads Anna to the Ufizzi Gallery in Florence in search of the rapist,
Alfredo. During her tour of the gallery the camera invites us to share her
point of view. When she looks at Botticelli's Primavera, we see her reflection
on the protective glass, it is also our reflection; the audience identifies
with Anna.
She starts to feel unwell as a result of the overpowering effects of the gallery.
This feeling is conveyed by the diegetic sounds she hears within her own head,
such as horses galloping and the noise of battle, spurred on by Uccello's
painting, The Rout of San Romano. The non-diegetic music also builds up, and
then reaches a crescendo when she is confronted by an image of Medusa's decapitated
head, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, with her terrifying expression brightly
lit up, painted on a shield for the Medici Armoury by Caravaggio; a practical
use of the apotropaic effect of the female genitals that Freud speaks about:
"What arouses horror in oneself will produce the same effect upon the
enemy against whom one is seeking to defend oneself." (3). Anna faints
and bashes her mouth against a ledge. At the moment of impact, Argento cuts
to a close-up shot of her lying on the floor; her police-issue gun is protruding
from the open bag. When she regains consciousness, we are again showed a close-up
of the bag, but now the gun has gone. Alfredo has taken it. The loss of the
gun, and the bashing of her teeth as Anna falls, construct her as a castrated
woman, with Alfredo in possession of the phallus/gun. Of course Anna does
not know this and she accepts his assistance and a handkerchief to wipe her
bleeding mouth.
He helps her into a taxi and she stares at him whilst winding up the open
car window. When the window is fully wound up, we see Alfredo's reflection
juxtaposed with close-up Anna's face peering out of the window. The reflection
of his body takes up half of the frame and Anna's face the remainder. This
shot predicts the invasion and possession of Anna's body and mind by Alfredo,
which will occur during the course of the film. The open-mouthed Medusa, and
Anna's injured mouth introduce a recurring oral motif within the film. In
her discussion of oral sadism Barbara Creed explains that myth, legend and
the history of taboos make it clear that children identify the vagina with
the mouth: "Sexual pleasure is also bound up with the excitation of the
mouth and lips and continues in this form into adult life. It is the connection
between orality and sexuality which is of particular relevance to a discussion
of the child's understanding of the nature of female genitals". (4).
Creed goes on to consider the child, whose experiences of the world are all
marked by oral influences; sucking and biting etc., and the terror he must
feel if he sees the mother as a castrating figure, and has projected an image
of a mouth onto her female genital area. (5). When Anna takes medication in
her hotel room, Argento has the camera follow the path of the pills down her
throat into her stomach; the camera is invading her body as Alfredo will,
but it enters her through her mouth, drawing a connection between orality
and sexuality. Alfredo appears in her room, his reflection is shown once again
next to hers in the glass covering the print on her wall. He throws her on
to the bed and says: "I want you the way you were this morning, with
your lips bleeding, I wanted so badly to kiss your mouth, your bleeding lips".
He produces a razor blade from his own mouth, cuts her lower lip, and rapes
her. The act of concealing a razor within a mouth, and of cutting her lip
can be seen as a reference to the vagina dentata; the power of the woman to
castrate. "Men hate and fear women because as castrated they reactivate
childhood fears of literal castration, and because they may at any time reject
their status as castrated and attempt to appropriate the symbolic phallus"
(6).
By cutting Anna's mouth, Alfredo is reconstructing her as castrated, as 'bearer
of the bleeding wound' (7). This act reassures him of his masculinity and
possession of the phallus, but it also raises the same paradox as contained
within Freud's essay on Medusa. Her decapitated head represents castration
whilst the hair/snakes mitigate the horror and replace the penis. Creed argues
that Medusa's head with its snarling mouth and fanged snakes is a seething
array of vagina dentata, not a multiplication of the penis, but of the woman's
power to castrate; containing no comforting elements whatsoever. (8). It is
ironic that Alfredo should also give rise to the same imagery; bloodied lips
are usually associated with the vampire, the most common form of the vagina
dentata in horror films. In seeking to reassure himself of his own power,
he has raised the spectre of his own destruction, because later in the film
Anna does reject her status as castrated. She overpowers Alfredo and appropriates
the symbolic phallus.
b) Anna as a man.
Her femininity is suppressed as she changes her appearance, and certain
traits associated with Alfredo come to the surface. On at least two occasions
she talks like Alfredo, and she directly quotes him prior to killing him.
After her brutalising experience, Anna cuts her hair and changes her clothing
from a dress to a baggy grey jacket and trousers, which make her appear more
masculine. She indulges in acts of self-mutilation; she jabs a paperclip under
her fingernails at the police hearing, and she cuts herself with a broken
wine glass on the train. Before breaking the glass she stares into the red
wine at her own reflection, this scene can be seen as a reference to the final
scene in Deep Red, where Marcus looks into a pool of blood at his reflection.
Like Marcus, Anna has experienced the most appalling acts of violence and
has become tainted by them.
Back in Rome she rejects her colleague/boyfriend, Marco's (Marco Leonardi),
advances. She hints at her change of identity by telling him, "I'm not
your woman anymore". She means that she doesn't want anything to do with
him outside of their working relationship, but she also implies that she is
literally not anybody's woman; she's not a woman at all. When Marco visits
her at her apartment she pushes him face first against the wall, and simulates
violent sex with him whilst mouthing abuse. She later explains to her psychologist,
Dr Cavanna (Paolo Bonacelli), "I wanted to fuck him like a man would.
The idea of sex makes me puke. I keep cutting myself". Dr Cavanna puts
her condition down to self-loathing due to being raped, and suggests that
she takes a break and goes back to her hometown of Viterbo.
Anna has entered a new phase of identity, and she feels that Alfredo is somehow
still inside her. At her family home in Viterbo, her brothers upset her by
telling her that she looks like a man. Robin Wood discusses Freud's Oedipus
complex in relation to the female child and her concept of castration. The
girl finding that little boys do have penises, fears that she has already
lost hers. (9). The anonymity of her mother, and her absence from the home
when Anna returns, suggests that her mother left, or died. This means Anna
and her two brothers were left to be brought up by her father. She grew up
in a totally male environment. She tells Dr Cavanna that she joined the police
force to get away from Viterbo. When her father learns that she has seen a
psychologist, he seems to be very uneasy, and he loses his temper when Anna's
brothers tell her she looks like a boy.
She has a flashback to a childhood experience at the local Etruscan museum.
She often visited the museum with her mother, an artist who was attempting
to teach her art history. Her father never accompanied them on these excursions.
On this occasion she was looking at some Etruscan statues and carvings when
she started to experience nausea and fainted. Her mother rushed into the room
to look after her. We see the reflection of her mother's body, but not her
face. The mother remains anonymous. We do however see the grotesque carved
representation of Medusa's face, mouth wide open with her tongue lolling out.
Medusa's face replaces the mother's. This flashback, and memory of her mother
urges Anna to try art as therapy. She covers her walls in large painted images
of open mouths.
Alfredo abducts Anna from her room utilising the telephone routine familiar
to us from films like Black Christmas (USA, 1974, d. Bob Clark) and Scream
(USA, 1997, d. Wes Craven), where the menacing call is made from within the
house. This time the caller is in the same room, using a mobile phone. He
takes her to a cave-like hideout covered in graffiti. The walls are adorned
with serpents, and a huge bear-like creature with bat ears and an exaggerated
penis. Alfredo rapes her again then leaves her alone, tied to an old bed.
He had been studying art prints, and predicting the effect they would have
on Anna, but he had obviously not given much thought to the images within
his own lair. The serpent is one face of the vagina dentata, straight from
Medusa's head. At this point Anna suffers her final attack of the Stendhal
Syndrome. All her previous attacks had been brought on by exposure to high
art, but this last hallucination is influenced by the graffiti. It proves
to be her saviour; the over-endowed bear creature lunges at her and empowers
her with the phallus. When Alfredo returns she overpowers him and regains
control of her gun/phallus, and turns it against him; she has rejected her
status as castrated.
In some ways the film departs somewhat from the generic conventions of the
rape/revenge film as categorised by Carol Clover. Alfredo is portrayed as
a handsome professional man, quite the opposite from the sleazy lowlife rapists
that feature in I Spit on your Grave (USA, 1978, d. Meir Zarchi) and House
at the Edge of the Park (Italy, 1980, d. Ruggero Deodato). He follows a shop
assistant on her way home from work and presents her with a rose. She is suitably
charmed by him, and allows him to walk with her whilst she tells him about
her recent problems with men. We see her from Alfredo's point of view, when
he speaks to her we hear his voice as distorted gibberish, but she understands
him. Argento is allowing us some insight into the killer's disturbed mind.
However, the shop assistant discovers this too late; she leads Alfredo to
a secluded place frequented by prostitutes and their clients, where he rapes
and murders her.
In another departure from generic convention, Argento actually has Anna take
on the role of rapist; she symbolically rapes Marco when she simulates sex
with him. However, in the manner of the more traditional genre films, she
adopts the position of Final Girl and castrates the monster. Anna has several
attempts on Alfredo's life before she throws him over the ledge into gushing
water; we are treated to repeated images of subjection. (10). She penetrates
Alfredo's neck with a straightened bedspring, his eye with her finger and
his body with bullets. The gun and bullets have been phallicised by Alfredo's
method of shooting his victims at the point of his orgasm; and his reflection
is caught on the side of one of his bullets, mid-flight, during the murder
of the shop assistant.
c) Anna as a man in drag.
After Alfredo's death Anna seems to recover from the self-loathing, and
the Stendhal Syndrome. She re-feminises herself, dons a long blonde wig and
dates a boy called Marie, several people comment on the feminine nature of
his name during the film. But this new persona can be seen as representing
Alfredo in drag, controlling half of her mind. Like Norman Bates and his 'mother'
in Psycho (USA, 1960, d. Alfred Hitchcock), if the part of her person that
is Anna expresses desire, then the part that is Alfredo will destroy the object
of that desire. Marie is doomed. During a later visit to Dr Cavanna, Anna
is shown sitting with her back to us smoking a cigarette, the blinds are down,
and they cast shadows across her blonde hair and back. The scene can be seen
as a reference to 1940's film noir; Anna is depicted as a femme fatale, the
fetishised, phallic woman. Men may chose to create a fetish in order to believe
that a woman is like himself, has a phallus instead of a vagina. This disavows
the idea of the woman as castrated or castrating. (11). Like the traditional
femme fatale, Anna has a gun in her purse, but this phallic woman does not
offer comfort. "The femme fatale is noted for changeability and treachery.
But in the noir thriller, not only is the hero frequently not sure whether
the woman is honest or a deceiver, but the heroine's characterisation is itself
fractured so that it is not evident to the audience whether she fills the
stereotype or not." (12).
To achieve this effect in Anna, Argento sets up Dr Cavanna as a possible murder
suspect after Marie's death. Cavanna had arrived quickly on the scene although
he could not have known of the crime. He also turns up unannounced at Anna's
door, she is afraid of him because he knows her as well as she knows herself.
At this point in the film we are led to believe that Anna's life is once again
in danger, but the opposite is true. Dr Cavanna and Marco are to die at the
hands of Anna/Alfredo; Dr Cavanna is stabbed and Marco is virtually decapitated
by the lid of a car boot. Whereas Deep Red contained a remark by Carlo that
referred to the Vagina Dentata, The Stendhal Syndrome contains direct references
and imagery relating to the same idea. Medusa's horrendous open mouth in the
museums, the violence committed by Alfredo; he shoots his victims through
the mouth at the point of orgasm and cuts Anna's lip, Anna's therapeutic paintings
of huge open mouths, and the shop assistant that lasciviously licks her lips,
and tells Alfredo: "I'm the oral type." Unfortunately for her, so
is Alfredo.
The Stendhal Syndrome is an unusual entry into Argento's series of gialli.
He uses Anna's hallucinations to fill in missing sections of the narrative;
we learn about her mission to catch Alfredo through her hallucination at the
hotel. Also, in a departure from the traditional array of knives and cutting
implements discussed in the previous chapter, the killer uses a gun. However,
even though he has strayed somewhat from the usual giallo format, Argento
uses the film as a vehicle to explore the notion of gender through the figure
of Anna. Although there appears to be a simple shift in the central character
from male to female, there are still many gender and identity problems to
be resolved.
NOTES
1. Freud, Sigmund. 'Medusa's Head', The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud. Volume XVIII (1920-1922). Hogarth Press. 1955. pp.
273-274.
2. Lucas, Tim. 'The Stendhal Syndrome' [review], Video Watchdog. Number 55.
January 2000. p. 19.
3. Freud, Sigmund, op. cit., p. 274.
4. Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous Feminine. Film, feminism, psychoanalysis.
Routledge. 1994. p. 113.
5. Ibid., p113.
6. Wood, Robin. 'An Introduction to the American Horror Film', Nichols, B
(ed), Movies and Methods Volume II. University of California Press, Ltd. 1985.
p. 212.
7. Mulvey, Laura. 'Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema', Easthope, Antony
(ed). Contemporary Film Theory. Longman Group UK Ltd. 1993. p. 112.
8. Creed, Barbara, op. cit., p. 111.
9. Wood, Robin. Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan. Columbia University Press.
USA. 1986. p. 135.
10. Hutchings, Peter. 'Masculinity and the Horror Film', Kirkham, P. &
Thumin, J. (ed), You Tarzan. Masculinity, Movies and Men. Lawrence and Wishart
Ltd. 1993. p. 87.
11. Creed, Barbara, op. cit., p. 116.
12. Gledhill, Christine. 'Klute 1: a contemporary film noir and feminist criticism',
Kaplan, E, Ann (ed), Women in Film Noir. British Film Institute. 1996. p.
18.
Paul Flanagan Winter 1999/2000